Your Inn

In the summer of 2008, I moved into a little apartment in Portland, Oregon’s Kenton district. It would be my first experience of living alone. The great thing about living alone is that you can use your free time to do whatever you want. I spent the majority of my free time watching baseball and soccer (live and on the internet), making cocktails, comparing Scotches, perusing Goodwill, reading comic books and manga and watching Japanese movies and anime. The downsides are there is often nobody to share your experiences with or offer alternative suggestions for things to do.

That autumn, I found at Goodwill a gold sequin dress that I, for whatever reason, thought would make a hilarious Halloween costume. For obvious reasons, I didn’t try it on until I got home. I had always been skinny, but as I tried to squeeze myself into the dress, it became obvious that I had gained some weight. If any man wonders why so many females struggle with body image issues, I highly recommend he try wearing women’s clothes. They are highly successful at highlighting non-conforming areas.

I realized my lifestyle had been both unhealthy and lethargic of late. My solution was to purchase a mountain bike from a pawn shop. Now, to those that are only aware of Portland by reputation, this might sound like the hip thing to do. After all, doesn’t everyone in Portland ride bikes everywhere? No, not actually, but they do talk about bicycles a lot. Regardless, this was a mountain bike, with thick tires and more gears than the Antikythera mechanism, which is as repulsive to a Portlander as a Casio keyboard to a classically-trained pianist. Riding one was an open invitation for a lecture on the superiority of the “fixie.” Riding one while wearing a cotton t-shirt, blue jeans and no helmet was enough to give a large percentage of the population a nervous meltdown.

I started getting up early on weekends and riding my bike west to St. Johns and traversing the trails in a park at the northwest corner called Pier Park. These trails were intertwined with a disc golf course, which was a game I had played with friends back in the late 90s when I had lived in Cedar Falls. It was fun- more fun than riding a bicycle, which is, quite frankly, boring as hell. Turns out all you do is push one foot down and then push the other foot down ad nauseam. It struck me that disc golf might make for a more entertaining exercise option. So when I found a guy selling discs out of a truck in the parking lot, I bought a couple.

I practiced throwing these discs in a baseball field next to the course and then played the first hole. There was a group waiting at hole two, and they informed me that I should join them because the course was too busy for me to be playing by myself. I meekly replied, “That’s okay,” and walked away back towards my bike as someone in the group laughed, “I think we scared him off!” I learned that the best way to play the course on weekends was to be done before noon. I also found a friend that often played the course with me, but on those occasions he picked me up in his car, even though he was an avid biker.

The logical place to ride a bike from Pier Park is Cathedral Park under the St. Johns Bridge. One weekend, I decided to stop at an uninviting bar I passed along the way cheesily named “Your Inn.” I felt that the lack of a bike rack gave promise that this would not be the typical Portland hipster bar. But upon entering, I discovered the bartender was a girl with jet black hair, arm sleeve tattoos, a black spaghetti-strap top, jean shorts and fishnet leggings- typically hipster. Since this was Portland, I figured she was probably a lesbian. But next, I discovered the strangest thing of all: here were only three beers on tap- Bud, Bud Light and Ninkasi Total Domination IPA. No joke. I didn’t know of anybody in Portland who would even consider two of those three options.

The regulars, I would learn, were retired boaters. Although there was a lot of flannel being worn, they were, for the most part, oblivious that Portland had been taken over by hipsters. They drank Budweiser (and Old Milwaukie,) but preferred it out of the can. They would ask me what an IPA was, but had no interest in trying it. They watched NASCAR on the two televisions strategically hung in the little place and tried their luck at the video lottery machine.

By law, every bar in Portland has to serve food. There are weirder laws, like the one where a vehicle has to stop for a pedestrian in an uncontrolled crosswalk (regardless of whether they’re actually wanting to cross), but I’ll not digress. This bar had a menu written on a chalkboard… and only the French fries were vegetarian.

I became a vegetarian before I knew there was a word for it. I didn’t know another vegetarian for years. Back then, in Iowa, vegetarianism was seen by the vast majority as an affront to their entire way of life. Therefore, I learned to be as discrete as possible about my personal food choices so as to not seem judgmental or disrespectful. I realized, for example, that when I was a guest at someone’s house, the only polite thing to do is to eat what you are served.

Then I moved to the west coast. In Portland, specifically, nearly everyone you meet either claims to be, used to be or wants to be a vegetarian, or worse, a vegan. Vegetarianism is the “in” thing to do. Consequently, when vegetarians go to a restaurant in Portland, they expect, nay demand that their diet be catered to. Portland vegetarians tend to be smug and sanctimonious. So while I was grateful that vegetarian meals were easy to find in Portland, I didn’t relate to the vegetarian clique.

Back at Your Inn, I asked the waitress if there was anything else to eat besides what was on the chalkboard. “Oh, yeah, we have all kinds of stuff back there.”

“Do you have anything vegetarian besides French fries?”

“Uh, I’m not sure, but I love experimenting with things. How about I invent something for you?”

“That’d be great, thanks!”

The waitress disappeared into a room behind the bar for about fifteen minutes, peeking out every so often to ask questions like, “Do you eat cheese?” Someone entered the bar, and the patrons explained that she’d be there to wait on them shortly.
This waitress would make me various random sandwiches on many weekends throughout the next six months. None of them were particularly great, but I really appreciated the gesture. Then one week, she wasn’t there. The gossip was she had been fired after an argument about her giving away too many free drinks. That was the last time I went to Your Inn.

I killed it as Liza Minnelli in the sequin dress on Halloween.

Portland, Part III

One day, I answered a call from an unrecognized number. “Heeey, this is Jake Fennell. Remember me?” Of course I did. We had been both bandmates and roommates back in the 90’s. Last I knew, he had run off to Colorado with some chick named Jen. “I just got off the phone with Carl, and he says you live in Portland now. I’m moving there, too! Do you think you could maybe pick me up at the train station in two hours?” Of course I could. It was great to see him.

Jake moved into a nice little apartment near downtown, across the street from the Trader Joe’s Tyler worked at. Tyler had been a mainstay at Tuna Tuesdays. When Tyler’s friend Colin returned from Canada to get his things out of storage and move into an apartment, I was somehow summoned to help, presumably because I was the only person anyone knew who owned a truck. I hadn’t met Colin before, but when the first several boxes in his storage unit consisted of Philip K. Dick books, original screenplays and manuscripts for graphic novels, I knew we’d get along well.

I bought a used bicycle and began riding it on weekends, which sounds like a very Portland-y thing to do- except I bought an 18-speed mountain bike instead of a single-speed road bike with no brakes. A trail near my apartment went through a disc golf course, which is a game I’d enjoyed playing in the late ‘90’s. I bought three discs and went there to play, but gave up when the course became un-navigable. Fortunately, Jeremy knew the course and soon we would be playing a round or two almost every weekend.

By and large, Portlanders liked to stay active but didn’t follow sports, excepting the Trailblazers. There were several kickball leagues consisting of co-eds on a softball field, drinking cans of PBR and asking each other what the rules were. They passionately disdained baseball. Perhaps it was because they had never witnessed Tim Wakefield hurling a knuckler or Barry Bonds crushing a ball. Once I was living alone I started going to Portland Beavers Triple-A baseball games. I often went alone, but had a whole slew of friends and acquaintances, of which one or two would sometimes join me. Despite the nicely laid out stadium and respectable team, the stands remained mostly empty. Eventually, nearly every home game became a routine of filling a flask of whisky and taking the train to the ballpark. After doing some internet research, I taught myself how to keep score, probably as a way of keeping myself company.

I caught wind that a couple friends (or maybe it was just Jim) would be watching a soccer match at a soccer-themed tavern the morning of May 6th, 2009, which seemed as good a way as any to start my birthday. I was familiar with the bar but had only been there on quiet evenings. I doubt I had ever seen an entire soccer match before, but back when I lived in Oakland, I had taken to watching soccer highlight videos, and at that time the greatest showman in the sport was Ronaldinho playing for FC Barcelona in Spain. I was also aware of this specific team because my family had an exchange student from Spain live with us when I was in 11th grade. He had explained to me the politics of Spanish “futbal.” He went for the team that represented Spanish Nationalism and was against the one that strove for equal recognition of minority ethnicities in Spain. This was ingrained in my memory because it had been a fascinating experience of someone trying to convince me of something and succeeding in convincing me of the exact opposite.

As I had become convinced Portlanders hated watching all sports other than basketball, I was surprised by the scene of rabid Chelsea fans. But I secretly and silently rooted for FC Barcelona in this Champions League semi-final, whatever that was…. Unfortunately, Chelsea take an early lead. Barcelona seem to be kicking the ball a lot, but never at the net. After a Barcelona player is shown a red card, they have to play the rest of the match with one less player, but instead of giving up, as the match nears the end, it becomes more and more frenzied. Somehow, if Barcelona can score a tying goal, that would mean they would win. (Two-legged ties and away goals were useless jargon to me, especially since that “tie” doesn’t refer to a draw.) Adding to my confusion, the match keeps going after time is up, and then Andrés Iniesta unexpectedly launches a ball that flies into the net like a heat-seeking missile. I found myself jumping out of my seat with a cry, and then felt the collective glares of a sardine-packed bar upon me. It was akin to being introduced to boxing via “the rumble in the jungle” or hockey by “the miracle on ice.” Despite that fact that I understood even less of what had happened than the (horrible) referee in that match, at that moment, I became a culé. (FC Barcelona would go on to beat Manchester United in the finals.)

I’m pretty sure I spent the rest of that day, like many others that spring, applying reflective tape to a 15 foot diameter geodesic dome Jake had built for his MFA final project.

I began going to Portland Timbers soccer matches, primarily with Colin. The Timbers played in the same stadium as the Beavers baseball team, but it was a completely different scene. Fans packed the place, screaming chants, banging drums and throwing streamers and smoke bombs when they scored. A lumberjack in the midst of the crowd wielded an actual chainsaw which he used to cut discs from a log to pass around the crowd. I also began going to watch women’s soccer matches at the University of Portland, one of the best female teams in the country, with Mike and Janaé. In 2010, I watched the entirety of every single World Cup match, thanks to espn3.com. Iniesta scored the winning goal in that one, too.

Incidentally, soccer would indirectly mean that 2010 would prove to be the last year for the Beavers AAA baseball team. The following year, the Timbers would become part of MLS’s primary division (an honor you have to earn on the pitch in Europe). A condition of that promotion is they needed their own stadium, but instead of building one they decided to try and move the Beavers somewhere else. The public made sure this “waste of money” would not occur. I, on the other hand, wrote the mayor stating I would move out of town if the Beavers weren’t there. That last season was special, because I met and beginning sitting with Geri and Sheila, who had been regularly attending games for years and years. Away players would say “hi” to them on their way to the batter’s box, which we sat right behind and could talk to them as they stretched.

I became involved with a Scotch tasting group that met once a month in the suburbs and began hosting various types of cocktail samplers at my place. But, for the most part, baseball and soccer away games or off-nights were spent experimenting with cocktails while watching Japanese movies and anime, especially after Jake moved to Seattle. I did remain friends with a girl he had dated named Janine, and we would occasionally cook dinner, go out to eat or watching movies with her son. Looking back, I’m realizing those evenings were perhaps the only times I wasn’t drinking. This was a direct result of me having been drinking too much the first few times we had met.

Those that were there will be chuckling that I have left out all of the dumb stuff that I did during my last couple years in Portland. (Well, that’s assuming the things I’ve written about aren’t dumb, which reminds me of a time someone attempted to insult both Portland and me by saying, “If you like drinking whisky at baseball games I can see why you like it here.”) But even while I was still somewhat hurt and angry about Rachel leaving, I was learning to embrace and discover the opportunities within the unforeseen and even unwanted randomness life sometimes forces upon us. Things not working out as desired make it possible for things to work out better than imagined, and only requires a willingness to adapt. This concept is perfectly illustrated by the Chinese game called Mahjong, which I had been introduced to in the Bay Area and had been teaching anybody willing to learn during my five years in Portland. This was why I had local artist Peter Archer tattoo my left upper arm with 18 random Mahjong tiles blowing in the wind. In August of 2010, I got rid of whatever didn’t fit into a rental SUV and moved away.

Portland, Part II

Carl and Ann, Jeremy and Sandy and Rachel and I started meeting up at the Hedge House every Tuesday night to take advantage of the weekly $2.50 pint special offered by all of the Lompoc Brewery destinations. I liked their Sockeye Cream Stout, especially on nitro, but their popular beer was C-Note IPA. The Hedge House was a small, clean place with a nice outdoor area in easy walking distance from where I was living.

Carl and I had met playing hacky-sack and then had been in a couple bands together back in the ‘90’s. The two of us had a great rapport and could riff together effortlessly for hours, both musically and comically. When Jeremy’s dry, understated observations were added to the mix, the shit got over-the-top. Carl would alternate between trying to make Ann laugh and gross her out. It was easy for anybody to make Sandy laugh. I was constantly trying to make Rachel laugh, and was usually successful. She had a boisterous, infectious cackle that softened the cloud of sadness that usually hung over her, especially when she was in Portland. She didn’t want to be in Portland. I think that’s why we went on camping trips as often as we could.

I enjoyed these regular social engagements precisely because I am not a sociable person. A major reason for, or perhaps result of this is that I’ve never gotten the hang of the unwritten rule that you’re generally supposed to do little more than amuse, indulge and placate others in group settings. Once I had a set of friends who understood that whatever I said was probably going to be inappropriate, I didn’t want to waver from them.

That is why it would be sometime before I went to “Tuna Tuesday,” which one of my co-workers, a genuinely quirky girl named Molly, persistently invited me to. Although I’ve heard her explain it several times, I don’t exactly recall the origins of Tuna Tuesday, but think it was a tradition Ted and Molly had inherited several years prior. Molly culled Portland’s art studios and super markets, looking for overly-educated, underpaid 20-somethings to invite over to this BYOB gathering, and Ted and Molly made and served Tuna sandwiches. That was pretty much it.

Neither Rachel nor I knew how to cook, so we worked together figuring it out. We made a lot of pasta dishes, which we paired with every red wine sold at Trader Joe’s. Then we started getting wines, breads and cheeses from a nearby Italian specialty shop, but that quickly got expensive, so we switched to sampling bourbons. Instead of finishing off one bourbon before moving on to the next, we saved the last few ounces until we had five or six that we would drink together with Rachel’s roommates in a blind tasting. On the second such tasting, we were surprised by the winner, so we tried the same bourbons again and a different one was the best- but it was in the same glass that had contained the winner the first time. (We were just using random shot glasses.) So finally, I put the same bourbon in both the winning glass and another, and was quite blown away by the difference the glass made.

Rachel had a roommate who worked as a bartender in a Peruvian restaurant. He spent his days sullying their kitchen with fruity rum-based cocktail combinations. They were too sweet for my palate, but he had several cocktail books lying around, and one day I read one in which each chapter explored both the life of an author and a beverage they are connected with, and it piqued my interest. I ordered a martini at a restaurant, since I’d never tried one before, and it was absolutely disgusting. I intuited that cocktail-making might be a lost art which had led to a public preference for drinks that tasted like Kool-Aid, and began buying and experimenting with cocktail-making ingredients, apparatus and glassware, reading cocktail books and seeking out competent bartenders to order drinks from.

In the autumn of 2007, Rachel and I moved into the Tuna Tuesday house with Molly, which was not far from both Carl and Ann and Jeremy and Sandy. But while Rachel and I now stayed home to be part of the household festivities on Tuesdays, they went to Fifth Quadrant, which was now the closest, but much less cozy, Lompoc location. Rachel and I began going out to eat every Friday evening.

On one summer Friday in 2008, Rachel didn’t return home from work. I called and asked if we were still planning on going out to eat that night, and she said, “No.” She stopped answering the phone after that. A few weeks later, I moved from the Tuna Tuesday home into my first ever solely occupied apartment, bought a pickup truck (with money granted from my mom) and switched from bourbon to Scotch. Looking back, I think the most important thing I lost when Rachel disappeared was an incentive to be funny.

Portland, Part I

My reasons for moving to Portland, Oregon on Halloween of 2005 were fairly simple: I knew people there, it was on the west coast and I needed to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area rat race. My primary goal upon arriving in Portland was to entrench myself in the local experimental music scene. I was both excited and confident in the development of my personal musical vision that had been formed over five years of intensive listening, practice and performance while in the Bay Area, which offered an atmosphere of many talented, educated and/or veteran musicians hungry to discover sonic potentialities, both improvised and compositional. Upwards of a hundred of us bounced between several underground clubs, aggressively pushing boundaries and challenging conventions. We intentionally tortured our instruments with alternate tunings, techniques and all manner of objects. We liked things fractured, microtonal and transitory.

Among the first people I met in Portland, at a competent music performance I attended the Friday after my arrival, was a welcoming girl named Whitney. She was taking money at the door. I paid in loose change representing, very literally, the last of my life’s savings. When I mentioned I was a drummer and new in town, she invited me to play along as atmospheric accompaniment for a contact dance group on Monday night. I didn’t know what contact dance was, but it proved an interesting opportunity to explore percussive textures and ambiences. Afterwards, Whitney invited me to join a housewarming party at the yurt she was moving into on the outskirts of town. Yep- a yurt. It was actually in a sheep pasture, and you had to be wary of the ram on the walk in.

Whitney had said she was going to spend that day hiking a trail near her novel dwelling and anyone was free to join her, but I was the only person that showed up for that. We talked about our somewhat sympathetic, somewhat divergent plans for the future as we walked. Whitney was never shy about voicing her views but also listened respectfully to my overly-opinionated opinions. She was focused, but didn’t take herself seriously. I never worried about offending her and vice versa. After the walk, a group of around a dozen or so gathered in the yurt and we spent the evening eating snacks, stoking the wood fire and playing the card game “Mafia.” It was one of the best nights I would ever spend in Portland, and it was my second weekend there….

Not long after, I attended a gathering in a warehouse featuring a cast of musicians and dancers in a continuous 12 hour performance, perhaps to celebrate the winter solstice, although I don’t exactly recall. The possibilities in exploration and experimentation over such a long period promised to bring out the best in what Portland musicians had to offer. Instead, they just spent the seven hours I was there playing un-interactive atmospheric whole tones. My approach would have been to drain all of my energy into the music and then find a way to keep going; theirs was to conserve as much energy as possible. I suppose they were envisioning a meditation on understatement and simplicity, but I found it absolutely appalling.

The bulk of the “fringe” musicians in Portland were either into contemporary hip-hop like Kanye West or late 19th and 20th Century French Classical composers such as Messiaen and Saint-Saens. (There was also a strong interest in Indian Classical music, which I adore, but the pretentiousness of those who attended such events was through the roof.) Portlanders preferred pure tones, rustic melodies and soothing harmonies. It soon became evident that nobody was interested in my musical vision, which was heavily influenced by mid 20th century European improv., spearheaded by the likes of Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker and Alexander von Schlippenbach. To the uninitiated, it sounds like noise, and indeed the musicians I encountered who attempted pure improv. did so by simply making noise, which I found infuriating and they observed to be pointless.

I decided to take things into my own hands and developed a monthly class introducing improvisational music concepts, expanding on a project I had curated at a venue in Oakland before it got turned into a parking lot. I held these workshops, thanks to Noah Mickens, in one of the surprisingly few performance venues in town. It lasted for about four sessions, and then Noah was fired as the promoter for that club.

I was invited to participate as part of a series of duet performances organized by Tim DuRoche, who was essentially the only jazz drummer in town and also someone familiar with the Bay Area scene. I had continued to join and play along with Whitney and the other contact dancers every Monday, and chose one of them to be the other half of my duet. I think Whitney was a bit miffed I didn’t choose her, but her dancing style was hip, elegant and suave, whereas the girl I wanted to work with was intense, abrupt and somewhat bipolar. Because Music and Dance by Derek Bailey and Min Tanaka is one of those pieces that had profoundly affected me about five years prior, I was very keen on the prospect, and indeed I thought our performance was fantastic.

Playing music is controlling an avalanche of moments in time. I endeavored to pour my entire being into each one of those moments. There were times when I felt this task had been successful to the point that I’d feel as I’d become detached from my body or begin seeing the music as colors or creatures, and whenever that occurred, I sort of had this anticipation, when the music finally stopped, that the entire universe would have been somehow radically changed. Perhaps the audience would be so alight with epiphanies they’d begin floating toward the ceiling or something. Instead, in California anyway, these moments would be met with polite applause. In Portland, they were met with the audience politely asking each other if there was any way to politely remove themselves from earshot as quickly as possible.

After the duet performance, the dancer said she was not interested in doing any other work together. I contacted and played with every musician whose name and number I could get a hold of, but nothing developed. I played several times with a girl who sang with an almost-absurd child-like voice, and finally she explained she was looking for a drummer like the one that played for Neutral Milk Hotel. After listening to one of their albums, I suggested she should find a young, inexperienced drummer enthusiastic about showing off the one lick they had learned, and she did.

In the meanwhile, I had quickly acquired a job a few blocks from the room-share where I lived, at a UPS Store. It was a really dumb job and I had to work weekend. Despite that, I kept a busy social life that first winter in Portland, due to Whitney always including me on various group excursions. I would not realize how novel being sociable during the winter was in Portland until later. Also, the weekend work was relatively fun because the managers weren’t there and my co-workers were often just Rachel and Cole, and the three of us got along famously.

Whitney was originally from Illinois, and I don’t even think she had been in Portland very long, but because she was the first person I met there, she had completely skewed my perception of the so-called City of Roses. In the spring, she moved away and joined a successful dance troupe based in New York City. I stopped going to the Monday night contact dance thing and gave up looking for musicians to play with. I finished up a manual on drumming insights that I had begun shortly after moving to the Bay Area back in 2000. For many years now, music had been more important to me than life itself. It seemed now that all music was good for was making me delusional. It was time to change that paradigm, and learn to enjoy living.

Rachel and I decided we should get jobs where we had the weekends free. After doing so, we spent the summer camping in the various environments offered throughout Oregon and Washington. It was sublime.

Alone

Most might not fathom or realize that I spend nearly 90% of my time alone. I work alone, live alone, sleep alone, eat alone, entertain alone, etc. I don’t intend this as a complaint; I mean it as a frame of reference regarding my state of existence, not my quality of being. I enjoy having alone time. Recently, on yet another occasion when someone was chastising me for belittling Christianity, it was stated that I must be miserable to be so bitter or whatever. (My major qualm with Christianity, besides the sheer ludicrousness of the religion itself, is that it wrecks havoc on American political decisions.) I replied that I live a very happy life. The person responded, “I doubt it.” What kind of screwed-up reaction is that? On the contrary, I am impervious to the depression that seems to haunt most people.

My solitude is somewhat by choice and somewhat imposed. I will admit I sometimes get paranoid that everybody is ignoring me when in actually they are just busy or whatnot. I forget that others have commitments and such. Also, most of the people I’d spend time with don’t live nearby. Almost everyone in Portland hibernates for the winter, anyway. Seriously.

Most people annoy me. They’re not nearly as interesting as they esteem themselves to be. I don’t have a lot in common with the masses. Never have. Further, I don’t pretend to, which really pisses some off. I find small-talk mostly boring. I find polite conversation mostly boring. I lack the ability to mutely ignore ignorant or disagreeable comments. I can be especially abrasive to those who don’t know me, and my friends know this. I’ve always been a moody person anyway, but sometimes the shock of having to interact socially with ignoramuses is a bit much.

Okay, I’ve bored myself with this topic. Talk to you later.

La Sirenita vs. La Bonita

La Sirenita and La Bonita are both Taquerias on the 2800 block of Alberta Street in Portland. Only an alleyway and a seemingly abandoned home separates them, but they are a world a part. Bottom line: there are La Sirenita people and there are La Bonita people. I am of the former.



La Sirenita is a run-down stucco place with a withering awning and graffiti tags all over it. There are colorful plastic tables to sit on outdoors. Inside is dark and haphazard with a television usually playing Mexican music videos (always with scantily clad women) in a corner. Mexican pop music blares from out of the kitchen. The walls are covered in cobwebs and plastic faux brick. Next to the counter is a big orange jug like something you’d see in a construction zone to pour yourself water from, if the Styrofoam cups have been stocked. The tables are not regularly bussed or cleaned, but most are stocked with a roll of paper towels. The employees are often singing, flirting or otherwise goofing around and you sometimes have to wait awhile for them to appear or decide to ask you what you want. I almost always want the no pales burrito. It is, in my opinion, possibly the greatest lunch ever invented, even though its quality varies widely depending upon who’s working that day. (For this reason, I don’t recommend La Sirenita on weekends.) For $3.50, you get a huge log consisting of piping hot cactus, rice, cheese and refried beans wrapped in a flour tortilla. They have a condiment bar with awesome grilled jalapenos. Their red sauce is okay but a bit too smoky for my taste. UPDATE: They sometimes have a second red sauce now which is much better. I seldom resist biting into the burrito before it cools down, so I usually end up burning the skin out of my mouth. Well worth it. I usually alternate between burrito and jalapeno bites. Yes, the jalapenos are spicy. (Why do people ask this?)



La Bonita is a much newer looking place, nicely painted (if you like mauve) with large windows and clean wood tables. Inside is mood lit with hanging emerald-colored lampshades, and waiters seat you and bring you menus as Rod Stewart serenades from above. I went there once, on a recommendation from a chef (at another restaurant) who said it was, “very clean.” Fortunately, cleanliness is not on my list of things desired in a taqueria. I ordered the veggie burrito, which had lettuce, broccoli, carrots and a bunch of other crap that doesn’t belong in a burrito. It also had black beans, which I sometimes like but don’t expect to see unless I ask for them specifically. It was like a cooked salad wrapped in a tortilla. Booooooring! The “gringo burrito” was over $5.00. It was about half the size as the burrito two doors down. I find myself wary of anyone who patronizes this establishment, and assume they are the same type of people who sit in coffee shops working on laptops. I don’t trust those people either.

Home

Others will often declare that they prefer to live where they feel most at home.

Of all the places I’ve been, I feel most at home in Oakland, California. You can act like an asshole and nobody gives a fuck because they’re used to it. Running bicyclists off the road is encouraged. The best places to be are unmarked and hidden so they’re not over-crowded. Tourists stay away because they fear they’ll get shot. Ethnic diversity is an understatement. The food and wine are awesome. You can watch baseball in a shitty stadium for two dollars on Tuesdays. You’re near enough to the navel-gazing trustafarian college town of Berkeley to rummage through their used book and CD stores, but far enough that your neighbors won’t be getting stoned and rehearsing their jam-band in the middle of the night. If you live near BART, getting to beautiful San Francisco is a breeze and you won’t have to figure out where to park once you arrive. There, you can watch baseball in a wonderful stadium if you can afford it, or wander through the Sutro Bath ruins for free.

I have no interest in living there again.


I can’t say I feel at home in Portland, Oregon at all. Everybody’s too busy being nice to worry about things like learning how to drive, but may heaven help you if you dare honk. The majority are nauseating health nuts. It’s a small town full of wanna-be country folk with no night life or music scene to speak of. The most exciting thing here is a huge, labyrinthine bookstore with one bathroom. People know way too much about micro-brews. They tell you it doesn’t snow here and then it does for a week straight. You can only buy hard liquor at a state-run, price-controlled store. The only professional sport is basketball. Perhaps worst of all, everybody’s constantly blah-blah-blahing about how great Portland is.

I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be.

4-way stops

Alright, kids, it’s time to learn how to navigate an intersection with a 4-way stop. I know, I know, it’s totally easy and YOU know how to do it. Then why is that almost every time I come to a 4-way stop, it consists of a bunch of idiots staring at each other, hoping some other car knows what to do? Two phrases I say to make myself laugh instead of pulling out a gat and going apeshit (not really) are “Is someone waiting for a sign from god?” and “What is this, a MENSA convention?” Yeah, I know, I’m pretty witty.

First things first: a 4-way stop is an intersection where traffic from all four directions has a stop sign or blinking red light. You should have the alertness to determine the nature of an intersection before you get to it. You do this by looking and planning ahead. In Portland, where whoever designed the intersections had a death wish for motor vehicle drivers (they think “bike safe” is the same as “car unsafe” here), the 4-way intersection stop signs don’t generally say “All Ways” under them like they do in the other states I’ve lived in.

At a 4-way intersection, the largest number of cars you should ever have to wait for before it’s your turn to go is THREE, and it will usually be less. I have watched cars (in my rear-view mirror) let 8-10 cars pass through the intersection before they go. There is no reason or excuse for this whatsoever.

One major misconception at a 4-way stop is that you always have to yield for cars that came to a stop before you. This is incorrect! You only need to yield for cars that stopped before you if your route and their route will cross in the intersection. The only time you’ll ever have to yield for a car across from you is if one of you is going straight and the other is turning left. (Not to muddy the waters, but if you are in this situation at an intersection where neither of you has a stop sign, the car turning left must yield to the car going straight even if that car got there first.) You only have to yield to the car on your left if it is going straight or if it is turning left and you aren’t turning right. You have to yield to a car on your right if you aren’t turning right unless it is turning right and you are turning left. In all other cases, you can just fucking go!

Next, let me explain to you the elusive notion of “right of way.” All this means is that, if you stopped at the same time as a car whose path you will cross in the intersection, the car on your right gets to go first, or if the car is across from you, the car going straight (i.e. not the car turning left). Also, in Oregon pedestrians always have the right of way. (Personally, I think pedestrians should be wary enough of cars to at least look both ways before crossing the street and hurrying the fuck up while doing so.)

You should never yield for anybody who stopped at the intersection after you. Don’t try to be polite and wave someone through out of turn. You are fucking up the whole process and making all traffic slow down unnecessarily. Just follow the goddamn rules.

Finally (although frankly I’m not sure about the law’s opinion on this), it is perfectly safe and encouraged by me to utilize the “screen.” Any of you who have ever played organized basketball should understand this concept. If the progression of traffic makes it impossible for a car you would otherwise have to yield to to move, you can go ahead and go out of turn if it is still possible for you to do so. For example, if a car across from you is going straight and preventing the car on your left from proceeding, you can go ahead and go straight utilizing the screen of the other vehicle even if the car on your left stopped before you. Take the quality and timing of the screen into consideration. A semi will provide a very good screen but a mini-cooper probably won’t provide one at all. If the timing of the screen doesn’t allow for you to come to a full stop and then accelerate across the intersection before it is over then don’t bother. If you missed your chance, don’t try to force the issue by pulling out in front of the car that used to be screened.

Once you’ve committed to crossing the intersection, proceed in a timely fashion. I can’t believe how frequently a car will pull out in front of me and then stop in my way to find out whether I’m going to collide with them or not. Don’t tempt me.

Shockingly, considering how much trouble others seem to have figuring it out, that's all there is to it. One thing that is really helpful at an intersection is USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL! You do this by turning it on before you get to the intersection. Portlanders have an annoying habit of turning on their signal while they turn. Whenever possible, I keep a close watch on the drivers of the other vehicles in order to determine which ones aren't paying any attention whatsoever, don't have a clue what they're doing or are just going to do it wrong. If the other cars are just going to sit there scratching their heads, I will just go ahead and go even if it's their turn. Of course, I am forced to yield to those that just go through the intersection without even looking.

Powell's

Truth be told, Portland is a pretty lame town. I don’t mean this in a bad way- I consider myself a pretty lame person. Portland’s lameness can be immediately demonstrated by asking any native Portlander what to do there. Eight out of ten times, the first thing out of their mouth will be “Have you been to Powell’s?”

Powell’s is a big book store. Actually, it’s a Portland chain, and there are a ton of them strewn all over town. I almost dare not mention that Powell’s originated in Chicago, lest some Portlander reads that fact and kills himself over the lie he’s been living. But THE Powell’s is on Burnside. Actually, the entrance is on Couch, which is stupidly pronounced Cooch. There’s nowhere to park near the store. They have a parking garage but it is always full.

I have no idea why anybody thinks Powell’s is a good tourist destination. Powell’s specializes in selling new and used easy-to-find still-in-print books. It is not like one of those used book stores on Telegraph in Berkeley, where you can spend hours happily stumbling across intriguing out-of-print titles you’d never heard of but wish you had time to read. Instead, you spend hours miserably stumbling over people trying to find the exit. Perhaps the fascinating lure of the store is that it was apparently designed by Daedalus, the architect most famous for creating the labyrinth that held the Minotaur in Greek mythology. Also, if you’re one of those people who likes going to carnivals but doesn’t ride the rides, Powell’s might be right up your alley.

In order to find a book, first you have to find a computer. In order to find a computer, you must randomly squeeze through narrow aisles past hundreds of people intentionally pretending to not notice they are in your way until you come across a line of people. Make sure it’s not the line for selling used books, the checkout counter or coffee shop. And not the long line: that is the line for the bathroom.

Before I continue, let me just pause to point out one fact about Powell’s. It contains 68,000 square feet of floor space and ONE BATHROOM. I am not kidding.

Okay, so you must stand in line for several minutes until a computer becomes available. Incidentally, computers are usually found near “information” booths, which are either empty or contain some cocky frat jock with a computer of his own in which he does the exact same thing you would do if you could just use the damn computer yourself, only slower and including superfluous questions about the book you are looking for. So just get to an empty computer, type in the book or subject you want. If you’re lucky, you won’t get a “Please Try Again” request or 255 listings to sift through but a correct title with a color and number under it. Write these down: you will not be able to remember them by the time you find what they correlate with in the store.

Every room is inexplicably assigned a color. I have no idea what these colors mean or how they relate to anything. I only know that to find a colored room, you must once again randomly squeeze through aisles, hoping to come across doorways and stairs, until you find the color you are looking for. Once you’re in the correct colored room, you must find the correct aisle number. Every aisle is numbered, but these numbers are not sequentially ordered or always easy to see. If you decide you want to purchase a book, then you’ll have to find the line to the checkout counter and be herded through it like bovine. Good luck!

An important word of caution: NEVER go into Powell’s with anybody you ever want to see again if you do not both have your cell phones on you. Never mind the fact that the person next to you is using their cell phone to loudly read every title to whoever’s on the other end. If you want to prevent spending the rest of your life in jail for what any fair court would deem “justifiable homicide,” leave all weapons at home.

Portland Drivers

I live in Portland, Oregon. Some would call the average Portlander courteous. I call them pansies. Their general fear of offending anyone manifests itself in their passivity and indecisiveness. This is particularly evident in their driving.

The number one most irritating driving habit of Portlanders is their predilection to come to a complete stop at an intersection if there is another vehicle, bicycle or pedestrian within 100 feet of the same intersection. This is irregardless of whether they have a green light or the right of way, even if they are turning right. I have been stopped in my car at a stop sign countless times in which the cross traffic with no stop sign comes to a complete stop from both directions to let me go. When turning left, it is commonplace for the vehicle in the oncoming lane to come to a stop to let you turn in front of them instead of just assuming you will do it yourself when there is a clearing in the oncoming traffic. Consequently, traffic jams are constantly being created where there are not that many vehicles.

This same passivity prevents Portlanders from being able to merge. I have almost been killed on at least two occasions when the car in front of me comes to the end of an on-ramp to an interstate and suddenly brakes to a complete stop- while I am going 50 mph two seconds behind them. I have heard many Portlanders actually complain when the drivers on the interstate don’t slow up to let them merge instead of speeding up to the flow of traffic to let themselves in. Traffic comes to a stop on the interstates every time it approaches an onramp, then speeds up to the speed limit until it reaches the next onramp.

I will admit it is sometimes humorous. One of my favorite pastimes in this town is watching people try to Parallel Park. But my normal response to these idiots has become to flip them off and scream curses at them until they give up trying to be polite to me and just follow the rules of the road.